Once Upon a Time...in the District
1993 is to me what 1969 is to Quentin Tarantino in terms of relative age at that time; Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is as much a love letter to this begone era of Los Angeles as it is a memory exercise for the award-winning filmmaker and he proceeds deeper into his own middle age. I don't feel middle-aged but I don't necessarily feel young either, it's the international travel and live music that keeps me rejuvenated -- it always has -- which is why I lean so heavily into it.
Anyway, 1993 was a weirdly formative year for me. We had been living in Fairfax for about a year at that point (Calling this Once Upon a Time...in the District seemed like a much better title than Once Upon a Time...in Fairfax, yeah?), I wrapped up kindergarten and started first grade. My sister would turn three that May and I would turn seven that August. It was a weird gap year in that it was the only year in elementary school where I had no major extracurricular activities; no sports, it was a year before I started studying martial arts, and two years before I started piano lessons...though it was also around that time that I really started paying attention to what my dad was playing on the car radio, like The Beatles and all that, so the foundation was quietly being set.
So with that in mind, most of my memories from that year come from elementary school itself. Kindergarten was only half a day and it was the only year that I rode a school bus everyday. Now, I was in school for the full day and, with both my parents working full time, I walked to and from school; a tradition that held for the rest of my primary and secondary school education. Being in Northern Virginia meant that walk -- about half a mile from my home -- that meant it was a pretty nice commute most of the time but we would get pretty gnarly winters and, by the end of May, you really felt that Virginia heat, especially with a full backpack.
My mom had wanted me to learn Korean but I remember somehow feeling burned out at the time. That old stereotype of the East Asian Tiger Mom was very much at play here and me and my sister were run ragged on that schoolwork. So I surprised my whole family by refusing to learn Korean but the compromise was that I would learn Spanish instead, with math and science being taught in that language. Coincidentally, math and science have always been the school subjects I'm weakest at. Maybe not a coincidence but, at this point, who knows.
So 1993 was the year I started studying Spanish and that's when my linguistic pursuits all started. Little did I know, of course, that I would keep studying Spanish beyond high school, major in it in college, study abroad in three different Spanish-speaking countries, and expand my studies beyond just Spanish but there it all was. I think my biggest regret from that year stems from that: My weakest language nowadays is Korean, which actually kind of is a big source of personal embarrassment. I've quietly been teaching myself Korean for some time and can actually read and write in it pretty well now as well as navigate Seoul in my mother's native language but I can and should do better. Having said that, what if studied Korean instead of Spanish in grade school? Would I have all that other language study down? Maybe it was all for the best, honestly, because I'll always have a deep love for the Spanish language and both Castilian and various Latin American cultures.
I also started to get battle scars! In kindergarten, we had this huge wooden playground that was built like a castle and really fun to run around and pretend you were a knight or Indiana Jones or whatever -- am I still pretending like I'm Indiana Jones all these decades later with these international trips? Probably, it's a bigger influence on that than, say, James Bond. It got replaced by a metal and fiberglass playground shortly thereafter following parental concerns over splinters which was probably for the best but, one rainy recess, I slipped and gashed my chin on the bridge. I nonchalantly walked up to my teacher and showed her my bloody face and hands to her horror and got six stitches after school. You can still see the scar all these years later.
In terms of pop culture, to tie it back a bit to Tarantino, I was still getting used to the fact that we had cable television; we didn't have that when we were living back in Arlington. There would be evenings when I was alone in the basement den where I would just channel surf, marveling that we had over a hundred channels. My interest in Saturday morning cartoons were winding down but I would run home from school throughout the year to watch new episodes of Batman: The Animated Series on Fox Kids. I think everybody forgets that show started as a tie-in to the previous year's Batman Returns, which I watched way too early because it's pretty fucking dark but those two Michael Keaton Batman movies and Jurassic Park loomed heavily for me. I read my first comic book in 1993, it was Superman #75 -- The Death of Superman. I don't know what exactly it says about me that the first comic I ever read was all about the medium's biggest icon literally getting killed but it definitely says something.
The Christmas of 1992 my parents had given me my first video game console in a Super Nintendo, with Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and Cal Ripken, Jr. Baseball, the latter of which was terrible but it was a baseball game that nominally starred my favorite player so it got an inordinate amount of time spent playing it despite its quality or lack thereof. I was incredibly surprised to get that Super Nintendo because both my parents were quite vocal about seeing video games as an addictive waste of time...and they weren't necessarily wrong but, clearly, video games have been a big part of my upbringing. And to double-down on my surprise, my birthday in 1993, my parents gave me a Game Boy with Kirby's Dream Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I played video games before 1993 but that was the year where I could play them in the comfort of my own home for the first time.
And, of course, while my friends from kindergarten carried over to first grade, it felt like everything really got bigger that year; those friendships deepened and new ones were formed; the biggest example that particular year was with Ed, whom I've been great friends with ever since and see on regular basis so shoutout to him. The recesses were incredibly fun, the schoolyard rivalries began to develop -- though fortunately those didn't carry over -- everyday felt like its own adventure and that was really cool. That's something I actively try to get back to, that idea that everyday is its own fresh start but also its own self-contained potential for great things. Obviously, I don't always deliver on that promise but it's a healthy, positive way to start the day, I think.
1993 was a year that unintentionally laid the groundwork for a lot of the person that I would become. Even outside of those formative friendships and familial experiences, it was the year that I started studying foreign languages, got into geeky things that would pay off decades later with my own burgeoning professional career, and everything seemed to really click into place. Not quite as dramatic as Tarantino's story -- a little more Stand By Me, if anything -- but definitely one where it started to come together.
Anyway, 1993 was a weirdly formative year for me. We had been living in Fairfax for about a year at that point (Calling this Once Upon a Time...in the District seemed like a much better title than Once Upon a Time...in Fairfax, yeah?), I wrapped up kindergarten and started first grade. My sister would turn three that May and I would turn seven that August. It was a weird gap year in that it was the only year in elementary school where I had no major extracurricular activities; no sports, it was a year before I started studying martial arts, and two years before I started piano lessons...though it was also around that time that I really started paying attention to what my dad was playing on the car radio, like The Beatles and all that, so the foundation was quietly being set.
So with that in mind, most of my memories from that year come from elementary school itself. Kindergarten was only half a day and it was the only year that I rode a school bus everyday. Now, I was in school for the full day and, with both my parents working full time, I walked to and from school; a tradition that held for the rest of my primary and secondary school education. Being in Northern Virginia meant that walk -- about half a mile from my home -- that meant it was a pretty nice commute most of the time but we would get pretty gnarly winters and, by the end of May, you really felt that Virginia heat, especially with a full backpack.
My mom had wanted me to learn Korean but I remember somehow feeling burned out at the time. That old stereotype of the East Asian Tiger Mom was very much at play here and me and my sister were run ragged on that schoolwork. So I surprised my whole family by refusing to learn Korean but the compromise was that I would learn Spanish instead, with math and science being taught in that language. Coincidentally, math and science have always been the school subjects I'm weakest at. Maybe not a coincidence but, at this point, who knows.
So 1993 was the year I started studying Spanish and that's when my linguistic pursuits all started. Little did I know, of course, that I would keep studying Spanish beyond high school, major in it in college, study abroad in three different Spanish-speaking countries, and expand my studies beyond just Spanish but there it all was. I think my biggest regret from that year stems from that: My weakest language nowadays is Korean, which actually kind of is a big source of personal embarrassment. I've quietly been teaching myself Korean for some time and can actually read and write in it pretty well now as well as navigate Seoul in my mother's native language but I can and should do better. Having said that, what if studied Korean instead of Spanish in grade school? Would I have all that other language study down? Maybe it was all for the best, honestly, because I'll always have a deep love for the Spanish language and both Castilian and various Latin American cultures.
I also started to get battle scars! In kindergarten, we had this huge wooden playground that was built like a castle and really fun to run around and pretend you were a knight or Indiana Jones or whatever -- am I still pretending like I'm Indiana Jones all these decades later with these international trips? Probably, it's a bigger influence on that than, say, James Bond. It got replaced by a metal and fiberglass playground shortly thereafter following parental concerns over splinters which was probably for the best but, one rainy recess, I slipped and gashed my chin on the bridge. I nonchalantly walked up to my teacher and showed her my bloody face and hands to her horror and got six stitches after school. You can still see the scar all these years later.
In terms of pop culture, to tie it back a bit to Tarantino, I was still getting used to the fact that we had cable television; we didn't have that when we were living back in Arlington. There would be evenings when I was alone in the basement den where I would just channel surf, marveling that we had over a hundred channels. My interest in Saturday morning cartoons were winding down but I would run home from school throughout the year to watch new episodes of Batman: The Animated Series on Fox Kids. I think everybody forgets that show started as a tie-in to the previous year's Batman Returns, which I watched way too early because it's pretty fucking dark but those two Michael Keaton Batman movies and Jurassic Park loomed heavily for me. I read my first comic book in 1993, it was Superman #75 -- The Death of Superman. I don't know what exactly it says about me that the first comic I ever read was all about the medium's biggest icon literally getting killed but it definitely says something.
The Christmas of 1992 my parents had given me my first video game console in a Super Nintendo, with Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and Cal Ripken, Jr. Baseball, the latter of which was terrible but it was a baseball game that nominally starred my favorite player so it got an inordinate amount of time spent playing it despite its quality or lack thereof. I was incredibly surprised to get that Super Nintendo because both my parents were quite vocal about seeing video games as an addictive waste of time...and they weren't necessarily wrong but, clearly, video games have been a big part of my upbringing. And to double-down on my surprise, my birthday in 1993, my parents gave me a Game Boy with Kirby's Dream Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I played video games before 1993 but that was the year where I could play them in the comfort of my own home for the first time.
And, of course, while my friends from kindergarten carried over to first grade, it felt like everything really got bigger that year; those friendships deepened and new ones were formed; the biggest example that particular year was with Ed, whom I've been great friends with ever since and see on regular basis so shoutout to him. The recesses were incredibly fun, the schoolyard rivalries began to develop -- though fortunately those didn't carry over -- everyday felt like its own adventure and that was really cool. That's something I actively try to get back to, that idea that everyday is its own fresh start but also its own self-contained potential for great things. Obviously, I don't always deliver on that promise but it's a healthy, positive way to start the day, I think.
1993 was a year that unintentionally laid the groundwork for a lot of the person that I would become. Even outside of those formative friendships and familial experiences, it was the year that I started studying foreign languages, got into geeky things that would pay off decades later with my own burgeoning professional career, and everything seemed to really click into place. Not quite as dramatic as Tarantino's story -- a little more Stand By Me, if anything -- but definitely one where it started to come together.
